How to Keep Ants Away
Remedies for ants: here are 5 strategies and 5 natural, infallible ways to keep ants away from your home. Forever!
Ants form a vast family, diversified for adaptation to the every habitat in the world.
How to Keep Ants Away
We start with 5 strategies to adopt before intervening with specific remedies.
1) The first objective is to find the source of the ants, examining closely all the rooms of the house. The ants utilize holes or cracks. It might seem absurd, but you have to follow the ants! One strategy to find the entrance points of the ants is to patiently follow one along its path for several minutes.
In this way, you can figure out the entrance points of the ants and potential sources of food.
2) Once the entrance points for the ants has been found in your house, you should rush to do repairs.
Figure out if it’s possible to close the openings with targeted interventions: you can apply plaster, which is great in the case of cracks in wood or bricks. Sometimes, ants can enter through cracks in gas pipes (watch out for ants in the kitchen!) or water pipes. In more extreme cases, you can intervene by substituting windows, should any of them exhibit failures.
It is also important to fix any cracks in the walls that could be an ideal place for ants to hide. Ants in the walls of your house are definitely nothing new.
3) Another very important thing is to make sure that the floor is completely clean and free of any food crumbs or food residues. It’s should check also in gaps behind furniture in the kitchen. Also try not to leave dirty plates in the sink or the organic waste disposal open.
Always keep food in sealed containers, paying special attention to foods that contain sugar such as marmalade, candy, and syrup. One solution to isolate these foods could be to put them in hermetically sealed bags or in glass jars.
4) Another thing to consider are ants in houseplant containers. If you have plants in the house, you should pay close attention to the potting soil used. Insects, in general, love the humidity of potting soil because it is their natural and ideal habitat. Try moving single plants onto the balcony or outside of the house. If one plant is invaded by ants, try doing an emergency replant, substituting with new and fresh soil.
To avoid new ants coming to colonize houseplant containers, eliminate dry leaves and wilted flowers right away. The container should always be clean.
5) Wash the floor with a solution composed of water, vinegar, and essential oil of cloves; this mix of substances will make your house an environment unfavorable to ants, thanks to the presence of clove oil. Vinegar is a good natural remedy for keeping ants away, however, its effects are only temporary. When the odor of vinegar disappears, the ants will again feel free to roam in your house!
Ants in the Kitchen, Remedies
Some drops of clove essential oil can be used in the areas most affected by ants. This is a very useful remedy for ants in the kitchen.
Lemon and orange essences (essential oil extracted by cold pressing lemon and orange peel) can also be very useful for keeping ants away. These essential oils are very effective natural repellents and are respectful to the environment.
Don’t underestimate ant repellents based on more innocuous compounds such as d-limonene. D-limonene is a simple extract of orange and lemon peel, another substance that ants prefer to stay away from. It’s for this reason that we advise you to give lemon essential oil a chance.
Ways to Keep Ants Away
Now we’ve come to the 5 most effective natural remedies to keep ants away from your home. We already explained the mixture of vinegar and clove oil.
1) Salt is a simple remedy and is easy to experiment with: scatter it along cracks and in possible entry points to the living space. Ants hate it!
This remedy to keep ants away becomes even more effective if you make large-grain salt wet with some drops of clove essential oil.
2) Powdered cayenne pepper and paprika are other substances that you can scatter in possible entry points to your apartment. This remedy is not advised if you have pets, dogs and cats in particular. It’s also not a good idea if you have babies at home.
3) To protect kitchen shelves, other than essential oil of clove, you can use simple dried oregano or bay leaves. Bay leaves and oregano are great natural remedies, these plants, just like cloves, emit a smell that we appreciate, but that the ants hate.
4) In the case of ants on the balcony, other than the remedies already listed, you can count on an ancient remedy that costs nothing. For the balcony, a remedy to keep ants away is constituted by coffee grinds that you can put near containers or between plants. Coffee grinds enrich the soil, however their effectiveness is nor always real. Ants seem to get used to the presence of coffee grinds, but it’s worth a try anyway.
5) Mint is another natural repellent to keep ants away. Mint, for us humans, has a good smell, but it also acts as a repellent to ants. You can use mint leaves in drawers or on dressers even if they have clothes in them.
Ants on Plants on the Balcony
You can take advantage of the natural repellents described previously or use specific products…better if not toxic.
When the ants are on the balcony and besiege ornamental houseplants, you can resolve the problem with a “Natural Pest Control” that you can put directly on the plant. It’s true, the price is a bit high (on Amazon the cost is 17.99 euros with free shipping), but it is a product that will save the life of your plants and save you a nervous breakdown.
Ants in Countryside Homes
If your house is in the open countryside, a quick remedy could be more difficult. You can battle against ants in open countryside houses by using preventative measures: the domestic environments, if they are free of crumbs or various food items, do not constitute an attraction to ants. Remember that ants enter in the house because they find, here and there, some crumbs or other more interesting food sources. With targeted interventions, you will be able to resolve the situation.
Remember to check that there are no plants with branches in direct contact with the building because they could be an ideal “doorway” for ants.
How to Eliminate Ants
If keeping ants away from your house is not enough, you will need to go on to more drastic remedies…Watch out! Drastic doesn’t necessarily mean “toxic insecticides”.
Pyrethrum is a very effective natural insecticide and is highly used in agriculture for controlling parasites (aphids and ants included). For all the information about its use: Pyrethrum, Natural Insecticide.
For those who are looking for even more extreme remedies, we send you to the Amazon page dedicated to home and garden maintenance, with products specifically made for driving away or eliminating ants.
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Translated by Raymond Bellon
Published by da Anna De Simone
